A Study of Daylight

So our next lighting project is to make a time of day study and recreate it digitally.  Now we are not actually trying to mimic the exact lighting in the scene, that is we aren't re-creating the study digitally, we are supposed to do more with it.  We have to make an outdoor scene with a transition of light from across the day.  I'd love to do the entire day if I have the time, but that is a big 'if'.
The first step, of course, is to make the study.  Unfortunately, at the time that I was able to make this study, the weather did not cooperate with me, and clouds moved in to make the sunset completely overcast.  While this is a great study of ambient light, it isn't showing the sunset colors like I had hoped for.  However, I plan to take another study of the light at sunset when the weather clears (and I have the time.)
For now, here is my study, showing noon (winter time), dusk (overcast), "golden hour" (overcast), and dawn (twice).  I plan to add more to this soon, we'll see how it goes.
(These are photographs, not digital renders.)

Noon (Winter time)

Dusk (Overcast) 

Golden Hour (Overcast)

Dawn

Dawn (closeup)

Eggs and Ice

So I've been busy working on various shaders and am moving onto lighting.  I have been working on Michelle Ionesue's senior film doing her texturing and lighting.  I have just finished a shader focusing on icicle stalactite/stalagmites in her cave scene.  It is supposed to have an eerie other-worldly feel to it, and I think I managed to get the feel she was going for.  Once I finish with the final tweaks on the textures, I am going to be moving onto the lighting for her scene.  I also have my film to texture and animate, and another friend, Raymond, who's film I'll be helping him texture and light.  And I am going to try to help with the 3D Group Project film as well.  Busy busy busy...
Other than that, I've been diving into the advanced Photorealistic lighting class.  This is promising to be a challenge, and is somehow both frustrating and fun at the same time.  The current project we are working on is to recreate a photograph of a bowl (or plate?) of eggs as accurately as possible.  I am struggling to get the lighting just right, but the biggest problem is trying to get the geometry just right, repositioning, resizing, reshaping, and adjusting every single object dozens of times and then fixing the lights and shadows.  It is far from perfect right now but I am well on my way with it.  I want to make this look as close to the original photograph as possible.
So I leave you with 2 images, one of my eggs, and the other of my ice shader.    Enjoy! (Updated)

Patterns and Tartans and Weaves, oh my!

Short post for now...
So back to the shader writing, I have finished a shader (which may still need editing) that has been inspired by weaves, tartans, and patterns.  I used sine waves to make subtle patterns in the background, diagonal lines, and layers and layers of stuff.
This was harder to make than it looks, plus it is editable in Maya so you can change things like the colors and the thickness of the stripes.

Enjoy

An Intro to Shader Writing

So lately, I've been learning how to do shader writing.  What does that mean?  Well for anyone who uses Maya (or any other 3D software), the shader is the thing that lets you apply a texture or color to your geometry, and interacts with the lights in the scene, such as spec highlights, diffuse, glow, incandescence, etc...  Lambert, Phong, Blinn, and Phong E are all examples of shaders.  What I am just starting to learn is how to write my own shaders.  Eventually, I can even set these up so you can plug in the variables for the Maya users to adjust, to make it user friendly.
Right now, it really just looks like a grid, well a weave at this point, which isn't like any other shader I just mentioned.  It has none of the light-interaction controls yet, and the other shaders don't control patterns like this one does.  However, this is just a learning tool.
It has been really fun to program so far, and there is still more to do on it, but I figured I'd post what I have so far and let people see.  I plan to add more colors, and maybe another pattern to this.  We'll see how it turns out.

In other news, I have been doing some serious Photoshop editing, but I'll go into that on another post.  The long and short of it is, I haven't really learned any new tools in Photoshop since I started, but I did learn some techniques I have never used before (which is what i was hoping to learn).  I kind of wish I could take their advanced Photoshop class to really dive into it.  We'll see.

Shaders and Textures Final (TECH 311), part 1

Another sleepless night, but that is expected during Finals week at SCAD.

Today, I have for you all my final from my Shaders and Textures class.  In short, this is a class that teaches how to make objects looks really cool with textures and a realistic reaction to light.  So you'd think the final project in this class would involve making some photo-real objects, but it isn't.  In fact, it is quite the opposite.

Our final was to use a non-traditional shading technique to make something that looks 2D in a 3D world.  We aren't talking toon-shaders, but something more advanced.  Our in class assignment was to make it look like a drawing, and still have a reaction to light.  As you can see here, the sketchy pencil marks really help make this scene look drawn, but it is in fact 3D.

So for my project, I decided to do a painting.  Specifically, I wanted to make an homage to one of my favorite artists, Vincent van Gogh, and his most famous painting, Starry Night.  In order to make this project, I got the assistance of my beautiful wife to help me literally paint with Acrylics (because I don't have nor know how to use oil paints) onto Bristol board and scanned into a computer.  I then manipulated the scans, adjusting colors and tiling the images and such.  From there, I input them into Maya, did a lot of adjustments, and placed them inside various procedural textures which add a lot to the render to make it look like more than just a bunch of flat strokes.  The scene I chose to do is, in fact, a direct homage to Starry Night, which is not as well-put-together as I would like, but I will play with that later.

I am also working on animating this scene with a camera pan through the painting.  I tried this already, but I forgot to bake in some of the textures, which messed up the sequence.  Once I fix this as well, I should have a pretty cool short flying out of a painting.

So for now, enjoy my rendition of a 3D Starry Night.

And now... SLEEP!

Photography Final

So today, I delivered a presentation for my Photography final.  In short, my assignment was to research an existing Photographer, and as I mentioned n a previous post, I decided to research Michael Eastman.  Specifically, I decided to try to capture the feel of 2 of his projects, Urban Luminosity and Vanishing America.  My project is called City and Country, and is meant to show a contrast between images of the city life and country environment.

For the City side of my project, I took pictures around Atlanta, including the beautiful Hyatt Regency hotel, and outside The Loft.  In all, I took about 160 images of this set, but for the final project, I had to choose 5.  I already posted several favorites that didn't make it into the final project, and I may add some more later.  These images were all designed to focus on the transmission and reflection of light, with a low ISO for high quality, and long exposures to catch as much detail as I could.

For the Country half, I went to Pendelton, South Carolina,  where I visited the historic areas and went off the beaten path to a few other areas, including an old train yard that was falling apart and covered in rust.  It was my favorite place to take pictures, but I started to run out of time as the sun was setting and the last few images got too rushed.  In the end, I took over 200 images from Pendelton, and chose 5 for my final, although I will post more later that really loved but didn't make it into the project.  These images mainly focused on the textures and wear/aging of the objects and locations.

I did do Photoshop editing to these images as well, to try to match the aesthetic Eastman uses, or something similar at least.  For his Urban Luminosity, he would saturate colors, clean up the dirt/debris (but not completely), and present a clean and vibrant image with patterns and colors boarding on the edge of abstract.  I cleaned up the majority of my City shots where I removed distracting dirt/debris, while enhancing colors.  For Eastman's Vanishing America images, he would often darken and enhance the sky, desaturating it while increasing the contrast and details.  Other than working with the sky, I would apply a slight desaturation (using an adjusted "Black and White" adjustment layer at low opacity) and bringing details back into the highlights of the image.  There is a huge advantage to working in 16bit with camera raw, which allows for HDR images and really pulling in the details lost in shadows and highlights.  While none of these are actually HDR in my final, I did bracket my images which will allow me to get HDR out of them, and I did work with HDR on a few that didn't get into the final.  I will be presenting more of these later.

Enjoy!

Sera

Well I'm smack dab in the middle of finals, which is why I haven't updated in the last week.
However, I do have a lot of new stuff to show, and more coming soon.
So for now, since I am so busy, allow me to show a project I have been working on in a program called Mudbox.  This is like ZBrush, but easier to use.  This is not an in-depth look at either program, but it did help give an idea of how to do such a technique and where to go from here.
I decided to model a triceratops.  The original base model is one found in the Mudbox community, what I did was literally paint the 3D texture, color, specularity, and everything else, onto the model.  It is a technique called Texture Painting, and uses something called Displacement Maps, which I combined with Bump maps to create my image.
While I did bring this into Maya to render using Renderman, it wasn't as successful a transfer as I would have liked, so I am showing the mudbox file for now until i can get the renderman render to work properly.
I plan to go back and "dirty" it up a bit, and make more adjustments.
Enjoy!

And yes, this is based on the Triceratops in Jurassic Park.

And yes, I did name it "Sera" after the Triceratops in Land Before Time.

Photo Preview

Today I have for you a preview of my final project in my photography class.

The final project in this class is to take a photographer (or other artist), and either try to mimic their style and work, or improve on it.  Since I would rather learn from others, and not show them up, I chose to mimic a photographer.  After much searching, my wife and I found Michael Eastman.  Michael Eastman began taking pictures in 1972, and his work is really impressive!  He has done a series of different subjects, from Americana to horses to abstract to Cuba.  His images have a certain aesthetic appeal I really like, and I find that his study of reflective, refractive, transmitting of light in a city at night is intriguing, bordering on abstract, but with a certain sense of place.  You look at things you see everyday in a new way, or at things people never notice at all that's right in front of them.

Usually his images are of textures and play of light.  I have to wonder how he gets into all these places, but I really enjoy his work.  I spent the better part of a weekend (with some planning beforehand) taking pictures around Atlanta.  Here is a preview of some of these images.

I will also be using a similar aesthetic to follow is Vanishing America series, contrasting the big city with rural country.

In the end, I have to pick a grand total of 10, so that's around 5 for each study.  But what I really care about in this is keeping consistant with te aesthetic and building some good photography samples for my demo reel.

Enjoy!

Bombs away!

So many possibilities with the name of this entry...  Duke Nuke-em, Drop the Nuke, Ground Zero, Nukes Away, To [insert enemy country here] With Love... you might notice a theme with them.

Today I want to talk briefly about Nuke, the compositing program by The Foundry.  In short, this is the program that most companies use to put all the different elements they create together.  It is also where they can add certain affects, which were impossible or unsatisfactory before this point.  For a long time, the industry mainly used Shake, owned by Apple Inc., however, it was discontinued in 2009, and while some studios still use it, it has mainly fallen to the wayside and Nuke is taking its place.

For most people, the closest thing to Nuke they will use is Adobe After Effects, which will allow you to do many of the same things as Nuke, but not nearly as robust or thoroughly.  After Effects mainly works with layers, much like Photoshop, giving the ability to place layers of effects over each other and blend them together.  However, this is actually very limited, and in the end, a Node-based network, like Nuke, is much better.  Both Nuke and Shake use node-based networks, much like Houdini as well.

The work I have been doing on Nuke is actually very fun.  I often have to go into Maya and separate a scene into passes, rendering only one portion of the image, from a specific object to a light, or even a mask, and then take these parts into Nuke, where I have to put them back together.  The advantage to this is that I can manipulate these elements in ways that are impossible or very difficult in Maya, giving me more control over my image.  These can be big changes, such as an overall hue shift for the entire scene, or something much smaller, like a tiny detail of an ambient shadow on a specific set of grapes.

Often, the node network will get rather cluttered, so it is up to the compositor to keep their work space organized, so when/if others have to work with it, they can understand with certain ease what all is happening.  I have heard horror stories about expert compositors who leave such a messy pile of spaghetti they call a node network that it literally took days to go through when handed off to someone else.  So recently, I have been working on keeping my networks organized and orderly.

Here is an example of a node network for a scene I am working on in one of my classes.  I did not make any of the scene itself, only split it into parts and composited it together again, adding ambient occlusion, color shifts, glows, etc.  While you can't see the names of the nodes at this distance, trust me when I say you can zoom in and see the names of every node easily identified.

Enjoy and keep pixellated!

Mushroom Madness!

Hey everyone,

Big news today!  I applied to be a student volunteer at SIGGRAPH 2013, and they accepted me!  Not only did they accept me, but they  are going to cover my housing!  This is great news, as this is a perfect opportunity for networking with professionals from all the major and influential companies in animation and visual effects.  The conference will be this July, and will last about a week, in Anaheim, California.

In other news...

Today I have a new project for you, and this one moves... sort of.  It animates at least.  The entire project was about using Autodesk Maya to render out Primary and Secondary passes, and then composite and animation them, post-production style, in Nuke.  Sounds like a bunch of fancy words I'm sure.  In short I am telling my 3D software to render out my scene in pieces, and then I put them back together and make changes to them in the composting software.
So this exercise involved taking existing models of mushrooms and applying up to 3 textures to them, and then adding my own background.  I decided to use an existing background I made before for a different class, and manipulated it for the scene.  I then rendered it in passes, brought it into Nuke, and make the colors change.  I also added the camera move and the depth of field as well in post as well.
While this is a "finished" project, it is not actually finished.  I will be reworking this to fix a bug or two and to enhance some of the effects.  Until then...

Enjoy!

Story telling through light

So another close call, but Day 4 is here.

This time I will show you 6 images, 3 drawn and 3 rendered in Maya, which depict a story through lighting.  The drawn images are the initial concepts, while the 3D renders are the final results.  I did not model or texture this character (Morpheus, and Blake), nor did I model the church (but it needed HEAVY editing), but I did model and file texture the alleyway and gun.  Enjoy!